Splitsville: this brilliantly unromantic open marriage comedy pulls no punches

Monogamy, gradually losing its status as a secular religion in our era of endless options, has come under the movie microscope recently in varied forms. The hideous prospect of long-term love engendered literal body-fusion in Together (2025), and partner-swapping is on the table alongside the hors d’oeuvres in Olivia Wilde’s forthcoming dinner dramedy The Invite. But director Michael Angelo Covino’s slyly hilarious screwball comedy really gets elbow-deep into today’s marital tensions between fidelity and Fomo, pulling its rueful laughs from two entwined New York marriages making messy detours into non-monogamy.

His smart script (co-written with co-star Kyle Marvin) takes the current obsession with experiencing life to the full and turns it into goofy slapstick set pieces. There are dark turns, though, like the opening fatal car accident which gentle Carey (Marvin) and his impulsive wife Ashley (Adria Arjona) cause by swerving across lanes during an attempt at sexual spontaneity with an at-the-wheel hand-job. Ashley’s immediate decision to divorce (suffering Yolo as well as Fomo, presumably) sends Carey seeking sanctuary at the summer house of his workaholic best buddy Paul (an abrasive Covino). But when he finds consolation with Paul’s neglected wife Julie (Dakota Johnson) after their smug confession of an open marriage, chaos rather than liberty reigns.

When Carey in turn lets Ashley open their marriage to her lovers, Covino and Marvin concoct an updated ‘comedy of remarriage’ from the two couples’ fumbling efforts to discover what they really want. In a film that puts the screw into screwball, the creators find their fun in the hypocrisies, jealousies and self-deceptions that their characters’ experiments in ‘ethical non-monogamy’ (ENM) breed – as when Carey helpfully invites Ashley’s many lovers to move into their house, enraging her when they form a cheerful Fifa league and in-house film club with him (“It’s Doctor Zhivago next week!”). All of this merriment is glimpsed in breezy comic montages linked by David Wingo and Dabney Morris’s jaunty 1960s Italian-inflected jazz score.

There’s a distinct whiff of the sophisticated US screwball of the 1970s, too, in Carey’s pinballing between Ashley and Julie, and in Paul’s increasingly desperate attempts to win back his wife. It feels like a wry and welcome throwback to films like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), and 10 (1979), which used modish ‘sexual liberation’ themes to modernise their marital battles. Like those films, it’s shot on 35mm with a cinematic ambition that’s rare in comedies nowadays, with cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra making elegant use of the entire frame, letting scenes unfold in long composed takes. Covino also combines his realistic characters with wild physical comedy in distinctly Blake Edwardsish fashion, using the camera for a visual punchline.

But the eight-minute knock-down, drag-out, house-wrecking fight that Paul has with Carey upon discovering he has slept with Julie isn’t just a fury-filled slapstick moment featuring Jackie Chan-worthy levels of destruction. It’s confirmation that – like Covino and Marvin’s toxic-friendship comedy The Climb (2020) – Splitsville is primarily concerned with envious male friendships and male insecurity. When Julie points out flatly that Carey is “kind and trustworthy, and has a bigger dick than you”, she’s verbalising Paul’s greatest fears, and his obsession with what he’s lost threatens both his family and his teetering business. Not so much a battle of the sexes as a battle of the bros, the film gives the consistently funny Covino and Marvin ample opportunities to grab the lion’s share of the laughs, as a selfish asshole and a love-seeking pushover. With the story taking a man’s-eye view of break-ups, Arjona and Johnson feel a tad stereotyped, as a fiery thrill-seeker and a cool devoted mom respectively, their characters endlessly reacting to panicky male actions. As the film starts to spin its wheels towards the end, during a crazed birthday party for Ashley and Paul’s son at which the couples repeatedly break up and reconcile like teenagers, you can’t quite believe that the women would still be playing along.

Where the movie shines is in its pinpointing of the truth that ENM isn’t a fail-safe cheat code for avoiding marital disharmony. Watching Paul & Julie & Carey & Ashley realise in this most adult of movies that nothing wakes your needy Inner Child like marital jealousy, you discover the elusive delights of the ‘unromantic comedy’.

► Splitsville is in UK cinemas from 27 March.